The present invention relates generally to network management systems, and, more particularly, to self-optimizing systems and methods for managing and coordinating a plurality of applications deployed on an optical-switched data center network.
In the past several years, designing the next-generation data center network switching fabric and server interconnect has received much attention from both academia and industry. One approach seeks to design a completely flat network architecture, in which all-to-all non-blocking communication is achieved by deploying highly redundant switches and cables throughout the network. However, such designs are limited by high deployment cost and cabling complexity. In contrast, a second approach proposes constructing an over-subscribed network with on-demand high-throughput paths to resolve network congestion and hotspots. Examples of this approach are the, c-Through and Helios design hybrid electrical and optical network architectures. In these designs, the electrical portion is responsible for maintaining connectivity between all servers and delivering traffic for low-bandwidth flows and the optical portion provides on-demand high-bandwidth links for server pairs with heavy network traffic. Compared to these architectures, the newly proposed systems, such as the system presented in the referenced U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/719,026, pursue an all-optical design and employ optical switching and optical wavelength division multiplexing technologies. This on-demand bandwidth flexibility is achieved using reconfigurable optical switching devices, which are further controlled by a central network manager. This resulting network architecture is called a software defined optical switched network platform. However, managing such an optical switched data center network involves interacting with the low-level optical devices, monitoring network traffic statistics, and optimizing network performance, all of which are daunting tasks for most application developers and network operators.
Accordingly, it is desirable to solve the management challenges and complexities of software defined optical switched data center networks by providing a transparent and self-optimizing network management platform for application developers and network operators. It is further preferable to provide an intermediate management platform that abstracts functionalities of lower-layer physical optical network equipment, communicates with the higher-layer applications via application programming interfaces (APIs), and automatically coordinates, schedules and optimizes the actions of multiple applications.